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the egg or ovum. Since pollen shed from the anther cannot fertilize the ovum of its own
flower, it must therefore drift “promiscuously abroad” impregnating other species. If this
happened:the whole vegetable kingdom in a few years would be utterly confounded; Instead of
a regulated succession of marked species, the earth would be covered with monstrous
productions, which no botanist could either recognize or unravel.While it is true that pollen is sometimes shed from the anthers before the stigmas become
receptive, we now know that this is a mechanism that ensures outcrossing within a species
and that hybridization between different plant species is rare in nature. Smellie dismisses
the idea that wind and insects could serve as pollination vectors, commenting:is there any thing, in northern climates at least, more desultory and capricious than
the direction and motion of the winds? Can we form a conception of any thing more
casual and uncertain than the wayward paths of insects?The very notion, Smellie continues, that something as important as the fertility of the
“whole vegetable kingdom” should be left to chance is “repugnant to every idea of sound phi-
losophy.” Besides, he concludes triumphantly, “the reverse has been proved by Dr. Alston,
Camerarius, and Tournefort.” This is neither the first nor the last time that Camerarius’s
own exceptions would be cited as if they were the rule in his pollination studies. As we
shall see in the next chapter, German “nature philosophers” would repeat the same mis-
take, extending the debate on plant sex into the nineteenth century. Smellie reprinted his
Encyclopedia Britannica article on plant sex in 1790 in his book The Philosophy of Nature.
Although it was generally ignored in England, it was well- received in the United States.^19
Opposition to the Linnaean sexual system in England reached its zenith late in the eigh-
teenth century. As the gathering storm of the French Revolution stoked fears of foreign
invasion and social unrest, it fueled a backlash against the liberalism of the first half of
the century, which had seen a modest expansion of women’s rights.^20 Some self- appointed
male guardians of female morality viewed the popularity of the Linnaean sexual system
among women as a stalking horse for a variety of social ills: libertinism, radical Jacobinism,
feminism, and anarchy. The Cornish clergyman and poet Richard Polwhele went so far as
to blame Mary Wollstonecraft for the popularity of the Linnaean system among women.
In 1795, Wollstonecraft had defended the French Revolution in response to a critical pam-
phlet by the moderate conservative statesman Edmund Burke.^21 Adding to her notoriety,
while living in Paris, she had had an affair with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay
and had borne a child out of wedlock. To Richard Polwhele, she was wickedness incarnate.
Largely due to her influence, botany had become little more than lascivious sex education
in disguise. Those “unblushing” female botanists who were “eager for illicit knowledge”
were clearly “disciples of Miss W,” fumed Polwhele. “Botany has lately become a fashionable
amusement with the ladies,” he noted, “[b] ut how the study of the sexual system of plants
can accord with female modesty, I am not able to comprehend.” Worst of all, Polwhele com-
plained, “I have, several times, seen boys and girls botanizing together.”^22